Super Natural
by Tracey McTague
Trembling Pillow Press, Jan 2013
116 pages / $15  Buy from Amazon or SPD

Composed in three sections – “Thirst,” “Ancestor Midden,” and “Contagion” —Tracey McTague’s new volume of poems hinges on an exploration of prophecy and vision, and the correlations of these with history, science, magic, and (mis-)fortune.  This playful, satiric collection explicitly samples its sources in folklore, myth, and history, even as its subjects are the quotidian world of war, environmental collapse, sex, and children, “replete with nudie magazines / tarot cards, and dirty jokes.”  McTague, riffing on language’s cadences and sounds, plumbs both the longing for divine sight and the absurd state of the human-wrought world in the early 21^st century, wielding parody and satire with a language tempered by music and a rich reading of the human past.

Super Natural opens with a quote from Chogyam Trungpa articulating the Buddhist notion of Drala: “the unconditioned wisdom and power of the world that are beyond any dualism….There is no fundamental separation or duality between you and your world.” This explicit rejection of the Western separation of humankind from the rest of the world serves as the fundamental premise of the collection. The poisoning of the oceans, mass extinctions, “this age / of fever and ague / veiled black smoke / bottled for poison,” these are the fuel for the fire burning at the heart of these poems – the human socio-religio separation from the world we inhabit and the chaos which has ensued. Of our carbon- and consumption-fueled “bender,” McTague invokes a crow song—bird of death and prophecy—for us, trapped in a “straight-jacket  [nightmare] of our own making.”

Reading the present as much as the future, McTague’s poems serially invoke the raven/crow, as the poet charts the “super” natural catastrophes spiraling around us. “Above” and “beyond” nature, humankind is the super in the title of McTague’s book, our blind destruction of the one reality, this world.  Invoking vision—“macula witness”—she parodies both the human impulse for redemption and its blind traveling companion the capacity for contagion and destruction, even as she riffs on the Bard: “too hot the eye shines / but too numb to worry / as well-washed nun whispers / ‘Get thee to a summary of want.’” What we think we want and how we end up wanting—for a world.

“Thirst”, the book’s first section, plays on the correspondences between envy and sight and the evil eye, and the interwoven associations of tip/tipple, toasting and drinking as antidotes to ill omens: “The evil eye is thought to cause a withering sickness.” In this section, the crow/raven figures as both a harbinger of what we have wrought and a means of access to knowing/vision: “swig Burton’s bourbon / to speak bird / light foretold in future.” Just as thirst is her theme, the pollution of the oceans, the monstrous debris-tangles caught in its eddies, and the collapse of its fisheries figure centrally. Invoking Aquinas’ assertion that “…a song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth as voice,” McTague takes up her charge with withering satire and jubilant word play, strewing as she goes images of our strange, lovely, disintegrating world.

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Black God
by Ben Spivey
Blue Square Press, November 2012
144 pages / $6.00  Buy from Blue Square Press or Amazon (ebook)

 
“There’s something black in that place like it was untouched by God himself…or herself…”

*

Black God envelopes and overwhelms: to read it is to surrender to death and despair’s stark seduction, evoked by Spivey’s terse lyricism and brutal plot.

Cooper O’Rourke, protagonist, narrates his erasure from reality. He’s resigned himself to the New American Dream (his words): “keep working, don’t die.” The same can’t be said for his wife, an ex-architect with a malignant brain tumor. She’s just as resigned but to dying, kept alive nightly by a bedside respirator.

In a way, the couple live together:

“We were nearing retirement age—it would be overly simple to say that things never get easier…The same two cars were parked in the driveway. The same two cats leaped and slept—they’d loop infinity symbols between our legs…We tunneled around our home in paths to places that only we knew—a home is where we keep our secrets.”

The anemia of daily life ends with the wife’s articulation of her dying wish: for Cooper to assume guardianship of a home that isn’t theirs. He carries out her request—but the house harbors something too dark inside, and Cooper is enticed out of reality and into another world, half fugue state, half fever dream.

*

Summarizing Black God does it a disservice. Reiteration of its plot leaves the book’s essence—its languorous stasis—uncaptured. This stasis lurks in the subtext of Cooper’s narrative, and proves difficult to quantify. Its source seems to be traumas continually suffered by the protagonist, both in waking and dreaming life.

At first Cooper’s traumas manifest in the everyday—most aspects of life get the better of him, particularly the accumulation of age and time’s elusiveness:

“How much older we were…Change was expected, of course, but at the same time unexpected, rather creeping it seeped through all of the distractions: work, commute, religion, bills, sleep, health—we don’t always notice how we change…Myself as a boy would not recognize myself as a man. Might not recognize myself from dinner to dinner. Winter to winter.”

Cooper makes multiple mentions of this preoccupation with time, and it begins to appear as more than a simply anxiety. I call it a trauma because of its concrete effect on narrator, as shown in his narrative. Language could easily be added to Cooper’s list of seeped-through distractions: Each mention of change, of time or age, informs the compressed nature of Cooper’s story, and begins to suggest itself as the actual cause:

“ A clock ticked. The noise droned long after the hand moved onto the next second. That noise sustained too and the ticking (thickening) continued one onto another, another—the sounds and seconds stacked over each other, enveloping, encapsulating…”

For Cooper, time does not simply pass. His heightened description of a clock merely ticking suggests time as a solid substance, capable of thickening, enveloping—perhaps suffocating.

Of course, Cooper never points to the effects of his traumas. He simply observes them along with the reader, “How it seemed one day [he] slept and woke again married and older.”

Cooper also struggles with a lack of marital intimacy. Although lack of love isn’t implied, Cooper and his wife are clearly estranged—their house is full of secrets, of paths that only they know about, respectively.

Cooper’s narration places his wife at a distance, as does his failure to call her by name. His perception of her suggests continual unfamiliarity. He constantly looks at his wife as if seeing her for the first time. Otherwise she resembles something inhuman, or unfamiliar—while lying next to her he compares her twitching muscles to “hummingbird wings or piano strings.”

As Black God progresses, Cooper’s traumas begin to manifest outside of language, become physical repercussions. On a walk home, Cooper goes deaf and begins bleeding from every orifice, after hearing the sound of a “disoriented…reverberating clock.” He returns home unable to articulate what’s happened to his wife, nor can he hear a word she says. “My wife held her mouth open for a long time,” he observes. “She was either screaming or hinging it agape.”

*

Cooper’s quotidian traumas are soon replaced by those of his dreams. Observing the house inexplicably draws images from his dreams into reality—sporadic anachronisms. After entering the house, Cooper is submerged entirely, transported to a beach from which he’ll never return.

If a dream harbors the dreamer’s secret yearnings, Cooper’s reveals a deep-seated masochism. His is not the expected conventional idyll: instead of an alternative to his harsh reality, Cooper’s dreamscape hosts its own variety of trauma, specifically acute corporeal harm. Although Cooper’s dream afflictions are more severe than real life’s, their repercussions aren’t negative. Dream-trauma either resolves the problems of waking life, or leads to a transcendent, nirvana-like experience.

The dream hosts several reunions between Cooper and his wife. They find an intimacy, impossible in their own lives, through mutual corporeal harm, inflicted upon them by the forces of nature or by each other. Their limited conversation no longer reflects an inability to communicate, but the futility of verbal communication:

“When the stones were stacked…she pushed my left hand…between the friction of the stones. I felt the stinging salt air filling the new cuts. I felt the sun’s warmth…[she] thrust my shoulder, and shoved my waist into the stone’s cracks…You’re almost there, she said…Lastly she pulled my tongue from my mouth, she kept it balled in a fist. With all of my body reaching…like pieces of ribbon, twisted in the new breeze…She too filtered through the stones, falling over, and into the ocean…”

Although Cooper’s body is put through excruciating violence (and at his wife’s hands), the event is just as transcendent and intimate as it is traumatic. His wife comforts him while harming his body; he feels the sun’s warmth—a pleasant sensation. The event is both better and worse than anything from their reality. The couple suffers more than they did in reality, but it leads them to an higher state unattainable in life.

*

Although trauma is only one of Black God’s multiple threads, Spivey primarily deals in the aesthetics of suffering. He takes a common artistic preoccupation to the extreme, casts light on the darkest parts of the psyche without compromising their shadows.

You might consider Spivey a sentimental pioneer, a revealer of a despair better left untouched—or he may expose something you strive to forget, a dark matter that could have only been extracted from your nightmares.

***

Kara Clark (@karaaclark) is a writer from Connecticut.

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(Blue Square Press is currently working on relaunching their site, so please note that the URL may change at time. For updates, find them on Facebook.)

Hill William
by Scott McClanahan
Tyrant Books, Nov 2013
200 pages / $14  Buy from Amazon

There’s a moment in John Fante’s The Road to Los Angeles wherein his protagonist, Arturo Bandini, has taken all the photographs of beautiful Hollywood starlets he ritualistically masturbates to in the closet into the bathtub with him to drown them, so to speak, and attempt to move on with his life. In a matter of three or four pages it distills the awkwardness and hilarity of growing up into a beautiful, imaginative vision of this young man thrashing around in the tub with photographs surrounding him, their faces beginning to run. Around halfway through Scott McClanahan’s newest work, Hill William, I realized that I’d felt the same sense of awkwardness and hilarity for the past 80 pages, only subsiding briefly when one tale reaches its close, and the next begins.

Fans of McClanahan are well aware of his ability to convey these qualities through a multitude of works. Be it his early collections of Stories, The Collected Works from Lazy Fascist, or the recent Crapalachia, I’m hard pressed to think of any writer working today who so seamlessly blends the horrific with the heartfelt, or small town American mania with the universal notion of comedy, and a desperate search for meaning.

Hill William, for me, feels a bit like the perfect blend of his early short fiction with the all-too-real tales of Crapalachia, while transcending anything thus far and reading like Geronimo Rex-Barry Hannah got into a bareknuckle boxing match with Person-Sam Pink. (This was another comparison that immediately came to mind, if you’ll pardon my digressive tendency.)

Hill William is McClanahan’s first novel, and yet it functions more like a novel-in-stories, the protagonist presenting the reader with any number of characters from his youth like Gay Walter, a “sissified” young man with a pet hamster named Hardees, or Derrick Anger, a boy who introduces young Scott to masturbating via a “1970s’s style dirty book that didn’t even have any pictures in it really but just these drawings of people having sex and these little dirty stories to go along with them.” With each chapter heading comes a new interior landscape wherein the narrator confronts some element of growing up, and yet for all the coming-of-age apparent in Hill William there’s just as much obsession with the surrounding community and the idea of taking on new lives and personalities to pass the time.

Early on, in “Rainelle,” the narrator says “I looked out over the continentals on the street below me and in these houses were people walking around in the lights they just turned on. I sat and felt so lonely because I was only one person and couldn’t be each of them.” This, by itself, got me thinking about McClanahan’s status as a sort of modern day Carver or even Faulkner, in his ability to sit down and narrate quick glimpses into such a wide range of lives. Some of that curiosity about this range of lives explored in his former stories seems to come out again in this urge to embody the whole community while telling one character’s life.

Later, Gay Walter begins singing Alabama’s “Roll On,” when the narrator observes “he was no longer Gay Walter but someone else. He sang and we watched and listened and he was no longer on a porch in the mountains, but he was on a stage somewhere. He was no longer lip synching to the radio, but he was our own private superstar. He was singing our song and we were singing along.” Suddenly the middle of nowhere becomes the center of the universe and it’s due to a mixture of McClanahan’s intimate prose and the unobstructed sight of a child. No longer are we as a reader in the mountains of Appalachia but traveling above it all with a gang of strange perverted nobodies desperate to feel comfortable. The microcosm quickly becomes the microcosm, the particular the general.

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Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal
by David Dowker & Christine Stewart
BookThug, 2013
81 pages / $18  Buy from Amazon or SPD

I. “We are gathering interior circumference.”

“No longer a phantasm and not yet a sign, the unreal object of melancholy introjection opens a space that is neither the hallucinated oneiric scene of the phantasms nor the indifferent world of natural objects…. The topology of the unreal that melancholy designs in its immobile dialectic is, at the same time, a topology of culture.” – Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture

Virtualis is a dense and lyrical book mediated by visionary and philosophical language, commemorating “the vibratory distances between dreams.” Dowker and Stewart use exquisitely ornamental language to exalt the majesty of the senses in poems I found to be radically potent. This book weaves a kind of lexical magic as threads of stunning lyricism and metaphysical fantasia so vibrant it feels like a synesthetic dream. These poems appear as phantasms from the depths of the imaginal – bridging philosophy, musical language, at once odd and angular yet exquisitely crafted, like Brancusi’s Bird in Space. This book includes a reading list of philosophy books that are quoted, including works by Agamben, Deleuze, Benjamin and others.

Virtualis functions as a voyage into pure consciousness. The text’s mindfulness is a rich ore of ekphrastic palingenesis. The mix of some pretty heady philosophical language with soaring lyrical fantasia is something I find totally stimulating: “Our vocabularies maintain subjective principles not immediately apparent as the (inexplicable) lure of verdure.” The book’s philosophical language gives weight to its ethereal fantasia, grounding the book’s assemblage point in a preternatural realm of euphoric convergence weighted in the shells of some spectral egg, creating layers upon layers through which these poems can be enjoyed.

This is pretty ethereal stuff, and these abstractions generate a vortex of ideation that moves me as a reader into a realm of ideas for which there are no words. Imaginal texts can lure us to a state of the royal art, Raja-Yoga, where the mind is a kind of kaleidoscope fluctuating between realities all condensed into a multilayered assemblage.

Virtualis is a confluence of worlds in the sense that this book is a meeting place of ideas, of forms, of Beauty. The condensation of vertical space here is so utterly ripe with alchemical gold, forever “in the process of disassembling the semblance / of an open space.” Virtualis exemplifies the rajasic qualities of energy, movement, generation and animation. These are poems of “a mostly ghostly trace” that move through a luminous realm of alternative perceptions toward an aphasic state devoid of all mediocrity and ugliness. Its singular bravado is a daring exploration of sonic beauty and the integrated psyche. I commend the authors for their generosity of vision, and for willing to look “along the fringes of consciousness.”

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CENTERPIECE
by Daniel Muehlmeier/Lee Mothes
Warm Wax Inc., 1991
2 players / 30 minutes / $19.99 from eBay

CENTERPIECE is a board game designed by Daniel S. Muehlmeier, self-described “unlocker of secrets,” with art by Lee Mothes. It was taken off a Goa’uld mother ship.

You won’t find CENTERPIECE in the Toys & Games section of your local Barnes & Noble. The game, originally published in 1991, is a notoriously tough sell. “I do well in the twenty-dollar range,” said the author in his recent Kickstarter campaign, which managed to raise only $615 of funds from 23 backers. “I keep a few game boxes in my cars back-window. Creating sales proved tough for me.”

“One restaurant placed five games. Near where people pay. All five disappeared, I never even restock them. Example of really bad-marketing skills. Yet I’m really looking forward, to direct mail to customers.” Following the close of the Kickstarter, the game is now being listed on eBay under the heading “tradition game, toys and Hobbies.” Yet this is just a stepping stone for Muehlmeier, who would eventually like to see his game displayed in a contemporary art museum.

Nor is this a delusionary ambition. Bad-marketing skills aside, Muehlmeier’s creation intrigues; in fact, it’s best approached from the vantage point of art (as opposed to game) criticism. Even taken as a game, CENTERPIECE is an answering shot to the pet theory that the whole of a game’s value rests within its mechanical core, for which the superficial elements of theme and appearance serve as mere window dressing.

CENTERPIECE‘s mechanisms of play are invitingly familiar. In fact, CENTERPIECE could accurately be called a pastiche of several games known to all American children: Monopoly, Parcheesi, Chutes and Ladders. Pastiche in both senses of the word, since CENTERPIECE‘s core mechanisms walk a tricky line between quotidian simplicity and schizophrenic montage, made no more easily reconciled by the often indecipherable rules, which read like an antique riddle. “Players are encouraged to use common sense,” the single-leaf rules advise. “For example, if both players are sent to the Bird Cage; because a player rolled a two, while visiting the Honey Jar space. The player who rolled snake-eyes would roll for doubles first. Both player would stay for three turns, unless doubles were rolled.”

Once mastered, CENTERPIECE is an almost fully luck-driven affair, a roll-and-move game destined to be despised by the modern board game community, who have become spoiled by worker placement, economic engines, asymmetric player roles, and all the other innovations the last two decades have brought to the medium (remember, CENTERPIECE is a time capsule from the early ’90s, although aesthetically, it hearkens to an even earlier era). Yet the game’s “superficial” elements  are not to be discounted, for they create a metaphorical frame or structure as the game plays out, turning a simple reimagining of Monopoly into something that far exceeds the sum of its parts.

As if to embody this very statement, the first bread crumb along CENTERPIECE‘s allegorical trail is the fact that the game’s box, colorfully illustrated by artist Lee Mothes, is also central—both literally and figuratively—to its gameplay. Once the board has been unfolded, the box top is placed at its center, a mechanically unimportant gesture that receives special emphasis in the game rules—and is hammered home with every turn, as the dice pounding off of its cardboard surface speak testimony to its substance (that the dice must be rolled off of the box top is another apparently superficial but ritualistically significant gesture). As the eponymous centerpiece, this raised rectangle of cardboard naturally draws the eye—it is the only spot of color in an otherwise black-and-white composition—while hiding the game’s deepest secrets. A display of puzzle pieces nestled beneath track the players’ scores, and it is to Muehlmeier’s infinite credit that he keeps this indispensible information hidden away until the moment that the box is lifted, a moment that always coincides with a change in the data under scrutiny. It is the uncertainty principle actualized.

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Bleeding Edge
by Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Press HC, Sept 2013
496 pages / $28.95  Buy from Amazon or Indiebound

“I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you — you’re twenty minutes.” — Lorraine Minosa, Ace in the Hole (1951)

The appeal of the hard-boiled character archetype is their indefatigable coolness, their aloofness. We seem to like characters who react in seemingly inhuman ways to moments and situations in which the rest of us would be too consumed by nerves or emotions to construct a sentence, let alone a biting bit of  wordplay. These characters are mostly at home in the dimly lit offices and back alleyways of the film noir detective, but we see permutations of the archetype every time we encounter a dominant lead with a penchant for mouthing off to baddies with guns.

Hard-boiled works best with snoops, and Thomas Pynchon has veered his career into continuing to explore the limits of this character type, setting up camp everywhere from the Revolutionary War (Mason & Dixon) to 1980’s California (Vineland) with a cast of irreverent characters who never cease to check the self-importance of not only their verbal sparring partners, but of moments themselves.

But what Pynchon has chosen to explore in Bleeding Edge, his seventh novel, is what would happen if you took all of those Pychonian elements of irony and placed them in a time and place in which it didn’t stand out, and was, in fact, par for the course.

Maxine Tarnow, a rogue (or at least de-licensed) fraud investigator and single-ish (it’s complicated) mother of two, plays the part of our protagonist. She is, as teh novel opens, approached by Reg Despard, a filmmaker acquaintance, to look into the finances of a shady enterprise called hashlingrz, a deep-pocketed Internet company buying up infrastructure and failed start-ups that went under after the .Com bubble burst, a fate which hashlingrz itself somehow sidestepped. From there, we begin to fall headlong into lengthy list of classic noir tropes: the numbers that don’t add up, the seedy-yet-likable characters of the city’s underbelly, the overseas connections, and yes, even an homme fatale. New York City looms large (doesn’t it always?) as the book’s backdrop, not simply because of Pynchon’s love for it — Bleeding Edge is an unashamed love letter to the city — but because of what we all know to be coming: the book begins in March of 2001, and will lead us by the hand through nearly a year, including, of course, 11 September. If there’s reason to question Pynchon’s decided lack of in-depth development for any of the book’s other characters, it’s because New York itself is our secondary — or perhaps even primary — protagonist, itself “twenty minutes” in hot water.

Maxine, in all her hard-boiled glory, is Pynchon’s representation of irony incarnate, not that other sources aren’t otherwise readily available. But it’s through her that the book drives home it’s final point re:the death or non-death of irony, which is that 11 September did not kill irony, a claim that has manifested itself countless times in the last twelve odd years. What it did was remind us that irony doesn’t work all of the time, and for it to retain its bite, you have to allow for moments of fear and sincerity and bravery, not to mention silence. “For many people, especially in New York,” Pynchon jabs, “laughing is a way of being loud without having to say anything.”

When discussing postmodernism in general, and Pynchon in particular, these days, irony is the word burning on every tongue of every critic/commentator, easily the most vilified and misused word of the past decade and a half.

It’s nearly impossible to discuss postmodern irony without making reference to “E Pluribus Unum: Television and U.S. Fiction”, the ubiquitous essay by the late David Foster Wallace that decried mass culture’s co-option and subsequent neutering of irony, and proposed a revival of sincerity.

“The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels,” Wallace wrote, “born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.

While a new group of authors, Wallace, Franzen, Safran Foer et. all, ushered in a new era of sincerity in high art, the true cultural rot that Wallace had warned against wasn’t happening in lit mags, but quietly on the lower rungs of the cultural ladder. Most people took DFW’s essay as a grand metaphor for literature, but anyone with any cursory biographical knowledge of Wallace would know that he loved, to the point of addiction, bad television. And it was here that Wallace saw the writing on the wall. The Mark Leyners of the world were never the problem. Literature was too diffuse even then to really have the sort of devastating societal ramifications that Wallace foretold; but if you lose sincerity in “low” art, when it embraces what it is and no longer holds any pretensions about maybe passing as the “real” thing, and when it multiplies like wildfire, you’re doomed.

““Ain’t like I was ever Alfred Hitchcock or somethin,” Maxine’s filmmaker friend/client-pro-bono Reg admits proudly. “You can watch my stuff till you’re cross-eyed and there’ll never be any deeper meaning. I see something interesting, I shoot it is all. Future of film if you want to know—someday, more bandwidth, more video files up on the Internet, everybody’ll be shootin everything, way too much to look at, nothin will mean shit. Think of me as the prophet of that.”

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Collateral Light
by Julia Cohen
Brooklyn Arts Press, Oct 2013
94 pages / $15.95  Buy from BAP or SPD

On the first page of “No One Told Me I Was the Arrow”, Julia Cohen writes:

Caught, sickness, limit, spasm. No one told her. In this, the first poem in Collateral Light‘s first section, Cohen seems to be setting forth an aesthetic program both in her subject matter and in the laconic precision of her style: To move over the frozen terrain of an aestheticized life, practicing an insect-like lightness and thereby avoiding falling into the ‘snow’. This is not, in itself, an unadmirable pursuit. It is also one to which poetry is particularly well-adapted–is there any medium more capable of lambently exploring ‘the limit/of our/body’ without becoming mired? And yet perhaps I can be forgiven that my heart dipped in my chest at the prospect of another book devoted to elegies on the subject of inability and asymptotes. It therefore came as both a surprise and a relief when Cohen discards her regretful tone at the poem’s conclusion:

“An insect/on snow” nothing, O me of little faith. Cohen is ready and able to dive within. In Collateral Light, we have the pleasure of going with her.

Over course of the poems following this introduction, Cohen delivers on the promise vested in the conclusion of “No One Told Me I Was The Arrow”. Her writing revolves around shifts, mutations, permanence, lability. Certain terms recur with such regularity that they become fraught, even overloaded, with meaning. Arrows (those symbols of both indication and entry) appear again and again, both negatively (“My pixels/deflect arrows”) and positively (“I’m filled/with invisible arrows”). Coats, husks and shells are shedded or pierced, disrupting the boundaries between the within and without of a given person (as when she writes, “Kiss my puppy lips my deer lips/the animal inside that animal/alive & yelping through the skin”). The introduction or relaxation of this confusion is at the center of many of Cohen’s more arresting passages, such as in the eponymous poem’s opening lines:

Spreading whiteness, imperfect memory, gardens (be they sunken, frozen, night-, or made up of “Fake flowers burst forth from fake seeds”), ice, frost, veins, circulation and filtration. The throughlines multiply without compromising the slow, considered style. Cohen knows how to play to the strengths of that style; this is perhaps best-displayed by the particularly wonderful “The Decoy Museum Is Still”, in which sparse lines such as, “You walk into a stranger’s dirty pocket of air,” seize attention through their quiet profundity.

Cohen deserves to be lauded for what she is doing, but it’s nonetheless worth noting what she avoids doing. Her poems are both active and interactive, and yet possess none of the common signifiers that contemporary readers might associate with such terms. The rhythm is not argot-conversational or rat-a-tat percussive; the verses are not fit to bursting with pop-culture bricolage; there is no compulsive disgorging of confessional factoids. Cohen engages the reader through the steady application of precise language, carefully maintained across the length of each individual work. She never abandons her mode in favor of spasmodically gesturing beyond the limits of comprehensibility. If it seems like I’m belaboring the point, here, it’s because it’s a point that could stand a little belaboring: In a time when contemporary poetry is frequently (and unfairly) pigeonholed as belonging to either a hermetically classicistic tradition or a hypermodern, glossolalic movement, Cohen does not allow herself to be lumped in with either.

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